Haha good. It's sometimes like Sotsoft's idea who wanted me to code noise effect where human face would appear, but he believed paranormal stuff, like the quantum field of the noise effect, and we didn't do it. The face here appears and dissapears through the chaos, Sotsoft would approve!

@randomi, the idea is nearly identical to what ilmenit does in Mona. The image is generated in a loop with 64 iterations. Let N be the iteration number (N=64, 63, ..., 1). During each iteration I plot on the screen 4*N 2x2 pixel "points" with random coordinates X and Y. The plotting is done using XOR operation, so that mistakes can be potentially corrected. To add a touch of sophistication to the image I also plot 256 totally random _pixels_ after each iteration. My PRNG is a 24 bit Galoius LFSR with a bit mixer hacked at the end. The lower 16 bits of PRNG are seeded during each iteration (this is our "data"); the higher 8 bits are carried over from the previous iteration. The starting value of the higher 8 bits is an additional data value. Since the last few iterations do not plot many points, they are not seeded properly. Overall, the image is stored as 62*2+1=125 bytes of data. The lossy compression ratio here is lower compared to ilmenit's case (128*96/8 : 125 ~ 12.3x).

The specific choice of seeds, just like in the ilmenit's case, is obtained by an iterative brute-force search on a PC. I went through several configurations of the plotting algorithm to improve the overall image quality. Once I settled on a particular configuration, I went through some 5*256*64*65536 seed values (number 5 reflects the fact that my PRNG allowed 5 distinct feedback polynoms for the maximum period). The best looking image was then chosen manually. The overall computation took about one and a half days on 7 cores. I am confident that both the image quality and the speed of computation could have been further improved, but I ran out of time.

The menacing appearing and disappearing into the static is achieved by running an identical plotting loop with an incorrect seed value twice; during the first run the image gets completely corrupted by the noise, during the second the noise completly cancels itself out.

sim, I understand what you are saying. It is not particularly pleasant to be a Russian citizen these days. I find it impossible to ignore what is going on in Ukraine at the moment. I wanted to send this to a party in Russia, which is a part of a fairly large animation fest, i.e. far from demoscene-only. Thus, it could not have been any kind of explicit political statement. So I went for something ambivalent, menacing and, hopefully, reminiscent of the 1984 Apple advert. I do not think it was fully successful, in that I could not match the colour scheme of the Apple advert for technical reasons and also because you are not the only person to ask me this question. Just be assured - this was not a decision taken lightly.